Quotes and references taken from the book: “Media, Culture & Society. an Introduction” by Paul Hodkinson (2011).

ARE WE THE CAUSE OF OUR OWN CONSUMER CULTURE?

“It’s not difficult to see why theorists might take an optimistic view of the social of the internet. On the face of it, the technology places unprecedented control in the hands of the users, freeing them from the structured hierarchical information agenda set by dominant mass media corporations, as well as from the broader constraints of space and time……It offers the prospect of engaging a range of senses rather than just one and involves unprecedented levels of interactive participation.” (p.36)

So we have discussed and read already about the development of screen based technology and and new audience power, and considered how companies have had to alter their marketing and rhetorical tactics to accomodate this.

“One-way transmissions models are turned on their head and audiences afforded the role of central instigators rather than passive recipients.” (p.95)

We are more capable of immediate judgment and slander, so (perhaps) they have to keep changing to appease our new nature.

“The products put on offer do not have fixed, priory meanings that are waiting to be ‘decoded’. Rather, meaning is produced by consumers themselves in their interaction with texts. This prompts Fiske to proclaim that “popular culture is made by the people, not produced by the culture industry.”(1991a:24)” (p.96)

Because of the fast paced nature of information retrieval and gathering via screen, another alteration of marketing has been for them to become faster to accomodate this and our new wavering attention span.

“The lifespan of any one product or set of products becomes shorter as companies compete to shift our attention and money elsewhere as soon as possible. A picture is painted of an increasingly frantic and chaotic proliferation of more and more different symbolic products and servies into all aspects of our lives.” (p.267)

“Across, genres, the emphasis is on fast-moving, ever changing images that almost immediately are abandoned and replaced by something different. Rather than developing a complex, in-depth or coherent understanding of anything in particular then, the attention of the person flicking between TV channels in their living room while surfing the Internet on a laptop, constantly switches between a myriad of temporarily engaging images and representations. Context and history become less important and our responses to the images placed before us are dominated by emotional reactions, snap judgements and, ultimately, a thirst for the next bite sized snippet of content.” (p.268/9)

So it seems it is a vicious cycle. More media causes our new way of reading messages, which in turn, leads to the advertising to keep having to use such methods.

Related

Some great quotes there which sums up this “reactive” marketing technique. The introduction of screen based media really has altered the effectiveness of traditional advertising techniques, summed up brilliantly by your p.268/9 reference on ’emotional reactions’ and ‘snap judgements’.

Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink – The power of thinking without thinking, discusses the nature of snap judgements and the psychology behind it, how one can influence a person’s ‘adaptive unconscious’ so that they automatically (and unexplainably) react in a certain way. Similar to what advertising has become now, ‘two seconds is all it takes for a first reaction to be consistent with anything longer’ (p.13), which emphasises the importance of pop culture semiotics and signs that the audience can relate to (informed by social media).

It is a wonder how we aren’t brain dead from all the information we are fed! Does our nature of filtering information and context in advertising affect other aspects of our lives (attention span, patience, learning)?

Well, that kinda goes back to one of the other previous discourses? About how the human brain is especially malleable, and, as writing and reading aren’t initially a ‘natural’ ability of ours, it is learnt. So when we learn a new way of doing it, our brains adapt to it. So not so much brain dead as brain development – ironically?